Myths About Microsoft

Microsoft has a monopoly?

There are two kinds of "monopolies", which I'll call coercive and
competitive. Coercive involves actual violence or the real threat of it.
For example, organized crime has been handed its greatest gift -
a coercive monopoly on distributing certain pharmaceuticals -
this monopoly is enforced by the police, at the expense
of the taxpayers, who are also the people buying the product.
Try to compete with this monopoly and you die, either being shot
by BATF thugs or by organized crime thugs. Nice setup, eh?

The Post Office is a coercive monopoly in most countries;
you can be put in jail by force if you try to start your own
first-class mail delivery service, in many countries.

A competitive monopoly is one that comes about as a result of
market forces. Competitive monopolies generally don't last as long
as coercive ones because, despite the high cost of entry, there are
always people willing to try to compete, and some percentage of these
succeed. Just a generation ago, IBM was the perceived monopoly and
Microsoft came out of nowhere.

Many people have remarked upon how much the directory structure
of UNIX looks like that of MS-DOS, and wonder if UNIX copied it.
In fact, the UNIX directory structure was invented in 1970 by
Ken Thompson and another researcher at AT&T Bell Laboratories.
Bill Gates wanted to dominate the world so,
in the 1980s, Microsoft was working on its own version of UNIX.
They licensed it from AT&T and renamed it Xenix (since AT&T then
wouldn't let anybody use the name UNIX). Now the folk at the MS Campus
in Redmond are pretty collegial, so it wasn't long before the folks
in the Xenix project and the folks working on DOS were drinking together.
The DOS folks needed a way to get beyond the 15 "user areas" that
MS-DOS had inherited from CP/M-86 (see DOS history above).
The Xenix folk were bragging about how great UNIX-style directories
were. So they DOS folk looked, and became believers, and
borrowed the ideas and the syntax, but not the implementation.
UNIX's chdir/cd, mkdir (shortened to md), and directory tree notions
were grafted onto DOS's drive letters, and the slash (/) converted to
a backwards slash (\) in a move that has driven "bilingual" people
crazy ever since (it wasn't for that purpose; MS had already used "/"
as an option delimiter where UNIX used the "-", and felt they couldn't
change that for fear of breaking backwards compatibity).

Once Microsoft got the idea that they could write Windows NT and
stop paying royalties to AT&T, the Xenix project was cancelled.
However, it was taken over by a smaller company that had begun as
its largest dealer. The Santa Cruz Operation,
later shorted to SCO, continued to sell UNIX software and systems
until around 2001, when it was acquired by
Caldera.

Microsoft Invented Windows?

Window systems as we know them were invented by Xerox, at
their Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). Nearby SRI researcher
Doug Englebart invented the mouse as we know it.

When Apple Computer was foundering after
the first onslaught of the IBM PC (which even with its crippled
processor was faster than the
"Apple ][" or Apple 2) and MS-DOS, their leaders visited Xerox PARC
and saw window systems. They hired some of the talent away, and
put out the Apple Lisa (which I first saw demonstrated in Toronto around 1983).
Lisa was a flop, but she paved the way for (or even mutated into)
the Apple Macintosh.

Bill Gates, who even then wanted to dominate the world, saw the
Xerox Alto and decided he had to have one, too. He got his best geeks to
fake up a prototype, showed it at Comdex, and the press boys all wowed it.
Then they actually wrote it and, after 3.1 tries, got something that
barely worked :-) The rest is history.

For Further Reading

For Seattle DOS and MS-DOS, hit the library and read Microsystems
(later called Micro/Systems Journal)
for 1980-1984. Not the Microsoft Journal, but the original Microsystems
Journal put out by Sol Libes, and later cannibalized by Ziff-Davis.

For Bill Gates, check out the books Hard Drive and Over Drive.

For life on the Redmond Campus, check the book MicroSerfs,
by Douglas Copland, the same dude that coined the term Generation X.

Details...

As a single example, consider this Reuters story which appeared in
The Financial Post on January 12, 1998:

Microsoft Wins TCI Contract
Seattle -- Microsoft Corp scored a major victory Saturday in its
aggressive push to lead the convergence of television and the Internet,
winning a contract to supply the core sofware for at least fie million
advanced set-top boxes for cable giante Tele-Communications Inc.
The deal, hammerered out in negotiations that lasted until 2:30 a.m.,
came just a day after Microsfoft's bitter rival, Sun Microsystems Inc.
announced [that] TCI would use its [J]ava programming language in the boxes,

In other words, once Bill Gates was stung by Sun, he went
into the back room with TCI and a mandate to get even.

Microsoft is not above threatening to destroy entire companies
(even its own large customers) to get its own way.
Here's another quote from another Reuters article, also in
The Financial Post on January 12, 1998:

Software giant faces federal contempt charge
Washington -- Microsoft Corp faces federal charges of contempt tomorrow
for allegedly violating a judge's order requiring the software giant to sell
computer makers its Windows 95 software without building in a Web browser.
The Justice Department has aasked U.S. District Court Judge Thomas Penfield
Jackson to fine [the company] US$1 million a day for violating his
Dec. 11 preliminatry injunction...
The government stepped in last fall, after Microsoft threatened to cut off
Compaq Computer's access to Windows 95. Compaq needs Windows to stay in
business.

In other words, Bill was then so determined to destroy Netscape over
its dominance in the Browser field that he was willing to destroy Compaq
if they wouldn't help him do it.

The general ideas of windowed computer are all appropriated from
Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Centre) and environs, where windows, the mouse,
selection, drag-and-drop, the File/Edit/View menu, and so on
were all invented while Bill Gates was still just another college dropout.
See Michael Hiltzik's book
Dealers of Lightning for documentation on this.

Here are just a few of the major "innovations" in Windows '95, and where M$
"borrowed" them from:

IBM was designing and building its first Personal Computers
in the early 1980's, and needed an operating system. The main contender
seemed to be CP/M-86, a second-generation version of Control Program
for Microcomputers, a Digital Research product based on several
earlier systems including Digital Equipment (DEC)'s RT-11 and
another (Xerox??) operating system called simply CP, or Control Program.
So CP/M was a reimplementation of those for the 8080/Z80 microprocessors
that preceded the IBM PC.
CP/M-86 was a reimplementation of CP/M for the faster, 16-bit 8086
that was coming into vogue,
and its 8-bit cousin the 8088 that IBM eventually chose.

But then another reimplementation came out of the woodwork.
Seattle Computer's SC-DOS was also called QDOS, for Quick and Dirty OS;
written as it was in a pretty short time (rumor has it as little as one
weekend, which I find hard to believe).
SC-DOS was a clone of CP/M 86, and was sold for
personal computers based on the 8086.
Seattle didn't have any "application software" to run with it.
But Bill Gates was able to "bundle" this O/S with his Basic interpreter
(Basic was big back then, since it was small enough to run on machines
with 64KB). IBM bought into the deal, Gates bought the rights to the O/S
from Seattle for a song, Seattle went under, and Gates went on to
become the world's richest man. That's history, folks!